In the 2nd episode of Staying Relevant with the MasterNi, I am talking about my favorite and a highly recommended book ‘SAPIENS’ by Yuval Noah Harari.
Sapiens – A brief history of Humankind is a book dedicated to us humans who are self ignorant as we are and still are better off than the other species to have walked on this Earth before us.
I believe many of you would have already read this book as it has received a cult-like status.
The book shares a brief history of humankind, it is woven with some interesting stories and after each chapter, it unravels a lot of things for us. It makes us wonder why were our history books in school so dry and drab.
Yuval Noah Harari is a history professor and has a knack for storytelling. After reading this book your view of the world around us is going to change immensely.
I am sharing my unique takeaways from this fantastic book:
Takeaway no: 1 We homo sapiens perform much better than in olden times because of our ability to collaborate. This is something to ponder upon. We all are interdependent and that itself is our superpower.
Takeaway No 2: My favorite quote from the book, ‘We did not domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us’. Agriculture made us think not just about ourselves but about coming generations which in turn made the society model very complex and complicated. This definitely is a very different perspective to look at things.
When we say olden times were better we only look at the past we look at rose-tinted glasses, we completely ignore the misery that is nonexistent now.
Was the Agrarian society the great vision that we have been sold over the years? I don’t know how much sense does it make but I loved the idea of exploring this.
Takeaway No 3:Cultures are fluid and constantly evolving. Whenever you uphold or downgrade something saying that this is not our culture, take a step back and think about it, I always do it. It gives me a lot of mind space to work with.
Takeaway No 4: We, humans, are so capable because we believe in shared myths. It keeps us going, and if we are living by these myths shouldn’t we be telling amazing stories to our children instead of just content sharing.
These were my 4 major key takeaways from the SAPIENS.
I would insist all of you to read this book and share your views and key takeaways with us.
